Djab Wurrung woman and former Greens Senate candidate Sissy Austin was brutally attacked on 11 February 2023 while out trail running in Lal Lal– roughly 20 km away from where Murphy reportedly disappeared in Ballarat on 4 February 2024 while out for a regular run. 

Last year, Austin was allegedly attacked by a man with a homemade weapon (a rock tied to a stick) and knocked unconscious. Police at the time said they believed the attacker to be a Caucasian male wearing black jeans, a cap and no shoes or shirt.

Despite the brutal nature of the assault, her alleged attacker has yet to be found. Now, Austin says the police are revisiting her case with regards to Murphy’s disappearance but have failed to contact her regarding the investigation. 

In a scathing social media post on Wednesday, Austin laid bare the hypocrisy surrounding the police’s investigations into a missing white woman compared to her own case as a proud Aboriginal woman. 

“When a First Nations woman is attacked running, there’s little to no investigation. Then a year on a white woman goes missing running in the same town and now highly regarded detectives want to revisit my case, not because my life matters, but because the missing white woman’s does,” writes Austin.

“This is one of those clear examples where if police fail one of us, they fail all of us.”

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A post shared by Sissy Austin (@sissyxxaustin)

Police scaling back the ground search for Murphy

Murphy, 51, went missing over a week ago after leaving her Ballarat East home to go for one of her regular runs at around 7am. She was captured by her home’s security camera dressed in an exercise shirt and with her hair pulled back. 

The alarm was sounded after Murphy failed to attend a brunch she had planned later that day.

Emergency services and locals from the area launched a full-scale search of bushland, with no trace of her found. On Saturday, however, police announced they were scaling back the ground search. 

Retired homicide detective Charlie Bezzina told the ABC, that it’s likely the police have a specific line of inquiry to justify scaling back this land search. He believes investigators could be looking at the same suspects who attacked Austin last year. 

Having spent three-and-a-half decades investigating some of the nation’s worst crimes with Victoria police, Bezzina said that if he were on the case, he’d “be looking very closely about the whole investigation, did they have suspects, whether you need to go back and talk to her.”

“I’d be looking at the investigation file. Let’s start re-interviewing those suspects, let’s get them alibied.”

As community members join the search and social media groups post theories on Murphy’s disappearance, Victoria Police have discouraged people from speculating on the case while investigators continue to look for evidence. 

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Marking International Day for the Elimination of Violence against women, Yamatji Noongar woman and Greens Senator for Western Australia Dorinda Cox, tabled a motion to have the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee investigate and report on missing and murdered First Nation women, receiving unanimous support. Cox had called for the inquiry in her first speech to the Senate in October.

In a statement, the office of Senator Cox said the inquiry was a “necessary” step to ensure Australia properly investigates and addresses “the systemic causes of violence including underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional and historical causes contributing to the ongoing violence and particular vulnerabilities of First Nations women and children”.

A former police officer, Cox said she has heard from countless families left behind, who are devastated by the lack of urgency to get to the bottom of their loved ones’ deaths.

“This is necessary because we have a justice system that does not take seriously the issues of missing and murdered First Nations women and children in this country, so this inquiry will ask those question for those families,” she said.

“It is devastating to hear from families who don’t understand why the system does not take these cases seriously… As a former police officer, I know there is a different urgency into looking for First Nations women and girls.”

“This is linked to family and domestic violence First Nations women face… which is why we want to understand the framework and social issues that lead to these cases so we can do better to understand how to protect these women and children.”

Senator Cox said she knows of 76 missing and murdered First Nations women across the country and the data around those cases are “inconsistent and ad-hoc” between each jurisdiction.

“We need to do better and this is why we need a national inquiry, so we can see the standard of practice and how we can work together to develop better systems. This is a topic that doesn’t get much media attention yet devastates the lives of those broken by it.”

In December 2019 Federal shadow minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney called for a Senate inquiry into violence against Indigenous women, likewise noting the same “lack of urgency” and imploring government to give the crisis “greater attention and consideration”.

“There is certainly a lack of urgency, a lack of recognition of the broader issue of violence in Australia and the amount of women who lose their lives,” she told the ABC at the time.

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